Bøger i American Studies - A Monograph Series serien

Siri Hustvedt is one of the few contemporary US-American authors who consistently engages with the questions of seeing and perceiving in her work. However, despite the growing academic interest in her narratives, many aspects related to the depiction of these fundamental practices have been left unaddressed in the criticism. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the concepts of seeing and perceiving as represented in both her fictional and nonfictional writings published to date and argues that Hustvedt's texts reveal the deep entanglement of the senses that inform a meaningful human experience. Drawing on phenomenology and feminist epistemology, this study highlights Hustvedt's interest in embodied cultural habits and implicit forms of knowledge that play a crucial role in the ways people perceive the world and each other. Through the motif of gender masquerade, her narratives explore how the ideas about femininity and masculinity shape people's perceptions and interactions.

'Data Imaginary' is about the co-evolution of the literary and of data around the middle of the long nineteenth century. It argues that, during romanticism, US culture negotiated the outlines of the literary-what literature is, what literary value consists of, and what literature can do-in relation to the outlines of another representational project that was gaining sharper contours and a stronger foothold in public perception at the time: data. As the young nation was searching for a national literature of its own, data and data-driven practices formed an important foil, a conceptual resource to articulate the desire for a new, democratic literature.Revisiting formative decades of US literary self-perception through the conceptual lens of data, this book rethinks the representative project of transcendentalism, the catalog poetry of Walt Whitman, the formal experimentation of abolitionist literature, and the evolution of American (literary) studies.

'Writing during the Disasters' is devoted to conceptualizing the relation between suffering and poetic writing. This monograph investigates contemporary experimental American poetry which addresses forms of suffering that are largely entwined with structural dynamics. The book elaborates how particular poetic practices "materialize" and "write through" ongoing conditions of suffering which shape the present. In its interaction with works by seven poets and one artist collective, this study mobilizes and interlaces a variety of critical theoretical approaches - from affect theory, queer theory, Afropessimism, Black feminism, and new materialisms to psychoanalysis, dialectical materialism, and deconstruction. Moreover, this study develops novel terminological renditions of the nexus between suffering and literary representation. Ultimately, 'Writing during the Disasters' argues for "suffering" to be considered a valid and more prominent category of analysis in cultural and literary studies.

'Corporeal Battlegrounds' explores the depiction and critical potential of the entanglement of work and embodiment in contemporary realist U.S.-American novels. It argues that manifesting the elusive effects of contemporary capitalism in the figure of the laboring body allows for a critique of capitalism. The laboring body thus provides a gateway to understanding how power relations are perpetuated by the work we engage in and to revealing the inherent logic of capitalism.To provide a comprehensive view, each larger section examines one aspect of contemporary capitalism in conversation with a novel: social acceleration, digitalization, financialization, and 24/7 capitalism. These sections question how the novels approach the representability of economic relations and how the depiction of the laboring body functions to open up an area of tension to criticize the link between the laboring body, economic participation, and the perception of failure and success.

Participation is a core value of the U.S.-American concept of the nation. The promise of participation encompasses full and equal access to participate in political, social, cultural, religious, and economic activities. At the same time, exclusion from social participation has been salient in the history of the U.S., and recently even a decline in participation alongside growing polarization can be observed. The notion of participation, however, is more comprehensive than such a narrow political perspective may suggest. Forms of literary production and reception can likewise be understood as social practices of participation. This volume sheds light on how participation has been debated in contemporary Americanist scholarship. The papers included explore the idea of participation beyond its function as a political principle in a democratic nation-state, which will help to understand in more detail the diverse relationships between the literary, the cultural, and the political.